VARIOUS CLASSES OF WITNESSES.
In the application of this melancholy fact to the controversy between Christendom and the Mormon Church respecting the origin of the Book of Mormon, let no one charge me with a begging of the question because I am going to insist that the witnesses quoted by Mr. Schroeder are largely unreliable, because of their zeal against an innovation of orthodox Christianity. Not so. It is not my purpose to beg the question by use of the historic fact here brought to view. I only ask that it shall be given its proper value in weighing the evidence to be considered. And I lay stress upon it only because it is an element in the evidence adduced by Mr. Schroeder which is taken no account of at all by him.
He gives no weight at all, considers not at all, the evidence of those who have accepted Joseph Smith's account of the origin of the Book of Mormon, but he gives unbounded credence to every statement from the "interested witnesses" on the other side of the question, except, of course, where they are mutually destructive of each other, and then he seeks to explain away the inconsistencies and contradictions. A casual remark, a reported saying, or a confused recollection of some obscure person, of whose character we have no knowledge, nor any means of testing it, find their way into some one or other of the hundred anti-Mormon books published, and then are published by such controversialists as Mr. Schroeder. Citations are made of them in marginal notes, and in time they come to be regarded, by the ordinary reader, as of equal authority with any other witness; and thus the unworthy, unreliable and, in some cases, a positively vicious and false witness is given equal—and sometimes even more than equal—credence with witnesses of unimpeachable probity, and high character, and who have back of their testimony perhaps a life time of toil, suffering, sacrifice, and sometimes martyrdom.
Of this class of witnesses let me here add one further remark. I know that Arch-deacon Paley and his "View of the Evidences of Christianity" are scoffed at by a certain school of latter-day critics, as being somewhat out of date and insipid; but there is one statement he makes that I cannot help but believe has great force in it. He holds in his argument that because the early Christians in support of the Christian miracles of which they were eye witnesses, and which so called miracles could not be resolved into delusion or mistake, passed their lives in labors, dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily undertaken, in attestation of the accounts which they delivered,—therefore, they are worthy of credence. To illustrate the point forcefully, he says:
"If the reformers in the time of Wickliffe, or of Luther; or those of England, in the time of Henry the Eighth, or of Queen Mary; or the founders of our religious sects since, such as were Mr. Whitfield and Mr. Wesley in our own times; had undergone the life of toil and exertion, of danger and suffering, which we know that many of them did undergo, for a miraculous story; that is to say, if they had founded their public ministry upon the allegation of miracles wrought within their own knowledge, and upon narratives which could not be resolved into delusion or mistake; and if it had appeared, that their conduct really had its origin in these accounts, I should have believed them."[12]
[Footnote 12: Paley's "Evidences," proposition II, chap. I.]
I mention this matter here for two reasons; first because many of those witnesses who accepted the Book of Mormon as true, are of the class of witnesses here spoken of by Dr. Paley. They were men who voluntarily passed their lives in labors, dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily undertaken, in attestation of the accounts they delivered to the world of the Book of Mormon's origin; and second, because having conceded that men should cautiously receive the testimony to the so-called miraculous, I desire to say that when the events to which the testimony relates are of such character that they may not be resolved into delusion or mistake, and the testimony is backed up by a life of toil, danger and suffering, not only voluntarily undertaken but persisted in—then, I say, their testimony is such that it commands respect and acceptance; and at the very lowest valuation possible to be put upon it, should out-rank in credibility whole hecatombs of such witnesses to the contrary as are quoted by Mr. Schroeder—witnesses imbued, in many cases, with personal hatred of Joseph Smith and the Mormon system, and all influenced by sectarian zeal to uphold the orthodox view of such Christianity as existed at the time and place in which they lived.
But returning now to the point at which the foregoing digression began, let me say it is the promiscuous mingling and equalizing of witnesses; and the failure to take into account the unreliability of witnesses of the orthodox party when resisting and seeking to overthrow what they regard as an innovation upon their most cherished ideas and institutions, that I charge against Mr. Schroeder's treatment of the origin of the Book of Mormon. The witnesses must be weighed as well as counted in this controversy; and the liability recognized of the anti-Mormon witnesses, in the supposed interests of orthodoxy, resorting to the invention and promulgation of falsehood.